


Further Steps

by RandomnonsenseDA (B1nary_S0lo)



Series: Rora Surana [7]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Agoraphobia, Anxiety, Character Study, Drabble, Gen, Mage Origin, Ostagar, Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-30
Updated: 2018-08-30
Packaged: 2019-07-04 11:43:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15840594
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/B1nary_S0lo/pseuds/RandomnonsenseDA
Summary: Quasi-sequel to "First Steps." Rora travels to Ostagar and adjusts to the outside world.





	Further Steps

The outside world was cold, brown, and too big. The trees stood tall and mostly leafless, and the roads were churning mud. The sight of the enormous sky filled Rora with the sensation of being pulled in every direction until she vanished, like smoke. Her body ached from walking. Mile after mile, day after day.

She was forever out of breath, eyes on the road or on Duncan ahead of her, so she would not have to see the dizzying landscape of sky and grass and houses and animals. Her eyes longed for rest, for cool stone and narrow corridors. Her nerves were frayed from jumping at every unfamiliar sound—the rustle of plants and the calls of strange creatures.

For the first few days, she and Duncan didn’t talk much. He spoke only to give direction or warning—“Just a few more miles today,” “We’ll pitch the tents here,” “This way. Carefully, now.”—and she was content just to listen and obey, to not have to make decisions when everything was so new and overwhelming. But, eventually she began to ask questions.

“Where are we going again?”

“Ostagar, a fortress in the Korcari Wilds.”

“Where are we now?”

“In the Hinterlands, not too far from Redcliffe.”

He always answered her patiently, and she matched his explanations against the maps in her head, maps she once poured over in the library until she memorized them. It was fascinating to be  _in_  that landscape, like she’d fallen into a picture. She now recognized the shapes of landmarks they passed.

Plants, too, began to make sense to her, to stand out. Studying alchemy in the Circle, she worked only with dried and dead samples, so it took time before she could match those brown, shriveled things to what she saw growing along the trail. Eventually, she could name them in her head as she passed, like a chant—elfroot, deathroot, spindleweed, blood lotus.

Animals still startled her. They were forever sneaking, creeping, crawling, and calling. They came to the edge of their campsite, eyes glowing yellow in the dark, and she held herself very still, glad for the glow of the fire and Duncan sitting nearby.

To distract herself, she tried speaking even more. It wasn’t easy at first.  Duncan was quiet, with a tendency to give short answers, and Rora wasn’t much of a talker herself. But as the days passed they reached a sort of understanding. Though he had little to about the Grey Wardens or himself, but he told her about the history of the places they stopped, about things he’d seen on his travels, and other tidings from around the kingdom.

Rora liked learning things. She always had. By the time she was fifteen she’d read most of the Circle library, after all. But listening to Duncan was a different thing entirely. He spoke and the world grew still larger around her. It expanded past the limits of stone and torchlight, past trees and meadows and all the way to distant seas and mountains. He made it  _real._

One day, they crested a hill and a new landscape spread out before them. A great fortress of stone, much bigger than the Circle, with a tower rising high in the middle. Below she could see hundreds of tiny figures milling around, more people than she’d seen in years, and past it all, a vast wilderness of flat, tangled land spreading out to the horizon. The sight made her heart leap into her throat in a way it hadn’t in weeks.

“Ostagar,” Duncan said. “Are you ready?”

Rora nodded, though she didn’t feel ready at all. The outside world was bigger, was  _more_  than she’d ever imagined. Like it or not, she was now part of it.

**Author's Note:**

> This is another re-worked chapter from a deleted long fic about Rora.


End file.
